How Have Recent First-Time Winners Fared After Maiden Victory?

Tyler Reddick‘s clutch pass of Chase Elliott in the NASCAR Cup Series’ race at Road America last week secured the two-time NASCAR Xfinity Series champion’s first win in the sport’s premier division.

Yet after two consecutive titles, Reddick was the last of the three drivers who primarily contended for titles during that span to get a win. Cole Custer made a four-wide pass to score his first back in 2020 at Kentucky Speedway, while Christopher Bell chased down Joey Logano to win the Daytona International Speedway road course early in 2021.

Exactly two-and-a-half years into his Cup career, Reddick was still without a victory; it only took Custer about half a season and Bell about a year to get their first. Sunday (July 3) changed all of that, as Reddick — so close on multiple occasions in 2022 — finally got one, dominating the waning laps to score his first victory.

This current year has now become the season with the most first-time winners since 2011, when the same such category consisted of Trevor Bayne, Regan Smith, David Ragan, Paul Menard and Marcos Ambrose. A couple of parallels exist between the two seasons, too: the first such winner was in the Daytona 500 (Bayne, Austin Cindric) and another was a driver born outside the United States (Ambrose from Australia and Daniel Suarez from Mexico).

With Reddick’s consistency in 2022, it begged the question of how first-time winners have fared in the wake of their maiden victories. That’s a huge scope to take on, so I’m limiting the time span to the beginning of the current decade. Reddick became the 10th different driver to score their maiden victory in the 2020s. The second to do so in the decade was William Byron, who returns to the site of his first win of 2022 with Atlanta Motor Speedway this weekend.

2020: Cole Custer & William Byron

In the COVID-impacted, bizarro year that was 2020, Custer and Byron were the only two drivers to visit victory lane for the first time.

Since Custer’s mid-season triumph at Kentucky, he had a relatively solid back half of 2020 (four top-10 finishes), but those seven such finishes that season dropped to just two in 2021 and zero through the first half of 2022.

Byron, meanwhile, has fared much better. His 20 top 10s in 2021 were a career mark, including 11 straight starting with his win at Homestead-Miami Speedway, and 2022 has featured a career high in wins with two already through 18 races. He’s also struggled, particularly in recent months,…